Having recently watched the DVD of the film version of Touching The
Void my wife decided she needed to read the book, so ordered it online for a
buck or so. Now, the nostrum that applies in such cases is generally that the
film is never good as the book, because books go into more detail, and the
pictures painted in the mind are rarely matched on film. The exceptions to this
rule are generally in science fiction or horror films, where the awe or dread
that can be felt through the visual image far supersedes that any word can
convey- the whole picture is worth….trope. The stellar example of this
comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey where the book, good as it is, falls far
short of the powerful imagery of the film.

The same can be said adventure films, generally, and TTV is no exception,
as words may go on for a few paragraphs to describe a climbing maneuver that
lasts half a second onscreen. The film is superior, more distilled and really
good, while the book is merely good. Joe Simpson, the mountaineer whose personal
struggle with the Andean peak Siula Grande after an accident nearly costs his
life, and that of his partner Simon Yates, is a good writer. The basic tale is
that the young duo, along with a third man, Richard Hawking- whom they met and
asked to tend their base camp, attempted to scale the unassailed peak. Upon
reaching the summit the pair encounter problems unexpected- both natural, and
due to their callow arrogance. Joe severely breaks his right leg nearly 20,000
feet up, falling and hitting a slope at the base of a cliff, also rupturing his
right knee, and shattering his right heel. Simon heroically attempts to rescue
his partner, but eventually, after Joe has helplessly fallen off the side of an
overhang, and dangles a hundred feet above a crevasse, Simon- unknowing his
partner’s fate, is faced with either being pulled off the mountain by Joe’s
weight, or ‘cutting the rope’ after hanging on for over an hour- a decision
for which we are told he was scorned in the mountaineering community- even
though that decision resulted in both men living through their disaster.

Simon returns to Richard and is racked with guilt, while Joe somehow
makes it out of a crevasse he’d fallen into, and down the mountain, to be
rescued by Simon and Richard. That’s the basic tale, but it’s how the story
is told that makes the memoir memorable, although ultimately nor as satisfying
as the visual feast of the film.

Joe has a taut, spare style of writing. Perhaps the only negative one can
point to is that he goes a little too much into techno-speak on mountaineering.
However, this is forgivable since that was the audience he was writing for. That
the book became a general public bestseller was a surprise. In a sense he writes
sort of like Mickey Spillane- with spare descriptions, clipped, but not as taut
as MS. But, there are some soaring moments of poetry- especially one scene where
Joe describes looking out of the crevasse at stars at night in a dreamy poetic
way that makes a very familiar scene seem new. He also has taken Simon’s
story, told to him since they were separated, and crafted a compelling
counter-narrative that acts antiphonally with Joe’s own tale. We get to
parallax the whole tale, which lends far more realism than a singular viewpoint
would.

The only negative part of the book is the ending, in which little
aftermath is given. While this is a good technique to start the book off with-
we get little background information on Joe and Simon (later in the memoir we
get a few digressions to past expeditions by them and others), and a few
tantalizing hints as to the rich life Richard Hawking has led- we are so drawn
to these characters that to not be given information feels a cheat. But, that
would be acceptable had the actual ending been good, narratively or in its mere
construction, or left us in a particular moment as we had been in other parts of
the book. Instead we end the book with this dreamy recollection of Joe’s being
readied for surgery on his broken leg in a hospital a few days after his rescue,
and his desire to not be operated on in Peru:

A strong hand pressed me back. Another gripped my arm and I felt the
slight pain of the needle. I tried to lift my head but somehow it doubled in
weight. Turning to the side I saw a tray of instruments. Above me bright lights
came on, and the room began to swim before my eyes. I had to say
something….had to stop them. Darkness slipped over the lights and slowly all
sounds muffled down to silence.

That’s it.
After this rousing tale the reader is left with this wet noodle of an ending.
This frustrates a reader far more than the slight drag a reader feels by reading
of the duo’s every single little mountaineering movement and the accompanying
emotions they felt. That, at least, lent a compelling authenticity to the
narrators’ voices. So did the descriptions of the physicality of the men,
mountain, and meteorological conditions. The end, alack….

That said,
this book is far better written than most of the ‘creative writing’ peddled
at MFA programs. Had he gone there before writing this I’m sure the book would
have been over twice its 184 pages, and larded with banal digressions that eked
into every little detail of Joe’s and Simon’s childhoods, endeavoring to
find the ‘real meaning’ behind why Simon cut the rope. Fortunately, Joe’s
a better writer than that, and better than Simon, a part of whose book Joe
quotes from in an afterword called Ten Years On.... It’s obvious from
the selection that Joe wrote Simon’s soliloquy in his own book, and does a
really good job of empathizing with the man a lesser man might scorn as someone
who abandoned him.

It’s
rare that such an archetypal story is so concisely well-written, especially
considering this was Joe’s first effort- usually these sorts of Gilgameshian man
vs. nature epics are long on the epic tale, and short on the ability to
convey it. Almost as rare as the adventure it describes.

[An expurgated version of this article originally appeared on the 4/05 Hackwriters website.]